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We examine the role of language production mechanisms in sentence repetition, a task widely used as a diagnostic tool in developmental disorders. We investigate sentence repetition in 5- to 8-year-old native speakers of Kannada, an inflectionally rich language of India. The inflectional characteristics of the language make it an ideal testing ground for exploring the engagement of grammatical and phonological encoding processes. We presented active, passive, and embedded sentences and, in a subset of the material, we also manipulated sentence length. Using accuracy and speech error analyses at the sentence, word, and affix levels, we provide evidence that individual differences in task performance are influenced by the linguistic properties of the material. These findings clarify the role of key language production mechanisms involved in sentence repetition. We propose that it is the versatility to develop a profile across several language production mechanisms that makes sentence repetition particularly useful as a clinical tool.

We investigate the role of distal, proximal, and child risk factors as predictors of reading readiness and attention and behavior in children at risk of dyslexia. The parents of a longitudinal sample of 251 preschool children, including children at family risk of dyslexia and children with preschool language difficulties, provided measures of socioeconomic status, home literacy environment, family stresses, and child health via interviews and questionnaires. Assessments of children's reading-related skills, behavior, and attention were used to define their readiness for learning at school entry. Children at family risk of dyslexia and children with preschool language difficulties experienced more environmental adversities and health risks than controls. The risks associated with family risk of dyslexia and with language status were additive. Both home literacy environment and child health predicted reading readiness while home literacy environment and family stresses predicted attention and behavior. Family risk of dyslexia did not predict readiness to learn once other risks were controlled and so seems likely to be best conceptualized as representing gene–environment correlations. Pooling across risks defined a cumulative risk index, which was a significant predictor of reading readiness and, together with nonverbal ability, accounted for 31% of the variance between children.

This study investigated the role of length and complexity on sentence repetition in children with dyslexia and typical readers. Length and complexity each had independent effects on sentence repetition, and children with dyslexia performed more poorly than typical readers. This group effect was attributable to individual differences in language rather than memory skills. Error analyses revealed that content words (specifically adjectives) were more likely to be omitted in longer than in shorter sentences independent of complexity. In complex sentences, function words (specifically prepositions) were the most vulnerable to errors, particularly for a subgroup of children with dyslexia who had oral language difficulties. It is proposed that deficits in sentence repetition are indicative of language difficulties in children with dyslexia.

In 1990 Gathercole and Baddeley proposed a strong hypothesis that has generated a wealth of research in the field of language development and disorder. The hypothesis was that phonological memory, as indexed by nonword repetition, is causally related to vocabulary development. Support for the hypothesis came from an impressive range of longitudinal, correlational, and laboratory training studies, and from studies of specific language impairment (SLI). However, more recently, Gathercole, Tiffany, Briscoe, Thorn, and The ALSPAC Team (2005), directly tested the causal hypothesis by following a cohort of children from age 5 to 8 years. Contrary to prediction, children with poor nonword repetition abilities at age 5 had normal vocabulary at the age of 8.

The majority of children who have adequate educational opportunity learn to read without difficulty, and this provides access to the wider curriculum. For a significant minority, however, specific learning difficulties represent a major obstacle to progress, initially with reading, spelling and writing processes and subsequently (as a consequence) with many other aspects of schooling. Reading and spelling difficulties are often accompanied by problems with numeracy, but some children have difficulties with arithmetic or mathematics in the absence of reading problems. Specific learning difficulties are commonly described as ‘dyslexia’ if they affect reading and spelling processes, and ‘dyscalculia’ if arithmetic is specifically affected. In addition the term ‘non-verbal learning difficulty’ or ‘syndrome’ (NVLS) is sometimes used to describe children whose main scholastic difficulty is with mathematical thinking but who may have accompanying problems with motor skills, attention and social relationships. There is a substantial body of evidence to guide clinical practice with respect to dyslexia, and to a lesser extent dyscalculia. In contrast, there is a paucity of research on NVLS, and it is not currently recognized in the diagnostic systems although similarities with Asperger syndrome have been noted. In view of the lack of consensus about this syndrome, we do not discuss it further here.

Three experiments investigated the ability of eight-year old children with poor language comprehension to produce past tense forms of verbs. Twenty children selected as poor comprehenders were compared to 20 age-matched control children. Although the poor comprehenders performed less well than controls on a range of tasks considered to tap verbal-semantic abilities, the two groups showed equivalent phonological skills. Poor comprehenders performed as well as control children when asked to inflect novel verbs and regular verbs. In contrast, poor comprehenders were less skilled than controls at inflecting both high frequency and low frequency irregular verbs. Although the predominant error pattern for all children was to over-regularize, this was most marked in the poor comprehenders; control children were more likely to produce errors that contained knowledge of the irregular form than poor comprehenders. In addition, the ability to inflect irregular verbs was related to individual differences in verbal-semantic skills. These findings are discussed within a framework in which verb inflection is related to underlying language skills in both the phonological and semantic domains.

Despite the evidence for a core phonological deficit in dyslexia, the nature of this deficit at the
level of the phonological representation is not well understood. In this study, the auditory word
gating paradigm was used to examine the quality of the underlying phonological representations in
dyslexic and average readers. Although the dyslexic children showed age-related nonword and
rapid naming deficits, they did not differ from the age-matched controls in the amount of
acoustic–phonetic input required to identify sets of words that varied in word frequency
and phonological neighborhood density. These results indicate that input phonological processing,
as tapped by the gating task, is normal in this group of dyslexic children, whereas their deficits on
the RAN tasks suggest that there are problems with phonological retrieval. The implications of
these results are considered in relation to the phonological representations hypothesis of dyslexia;
the evidence suggests that what is impaired in dyslexia are the retrieval processes that operate on
phonological representations.

A total of 38 preschool children (3 and 4 years old) were assessed on a set of phonological
awareness tasks three times over the course of a year. The tasks used were rhyme and alliteration
matching tasks with distractor items that were either semantically or phonologically related to the
target. In both tasks, the children found the distractors matched for phonological similarity more
difficult to reject than the semantically related distractors or the unrelated distractors. The results
emphasize the importance of controlling for global phonological factors when designing
phonological awareness tasks. The longitudinal findings are discussed within the context of
current theories on the development of phonological representations.

Using a word order correction paradigm, we assessed syntactic awareness skills in children
with good and poor reading comprehension, matched for age, decoding skill, and nonverbal
ability. Poor comprehenders performed less well than normal readers, and the performance of
both groups was influenced by the syntactic complexity and semantic ambiguity of the sentences.
These findings support the view that poor comprehenders have language processing difficulties
encompassing grammatical as well as semantic weaknesses, although their phonological
processing skills are normal. The implications of such language weaknesses for the development
of skilled reading are discussed.

This paper reports the literacy skills of 63 children selected as being at genetic risk of dyslexia
compared with 34 children from families reporting no history of reading impairment. Fifty-seven per cent of the at-risk group were delayed in literacy development at 6 years compared
with only 12% of controls. The “unimpaired” at-risk group were not statistically different
from controls on most cognitive and language measures at 45 months, whereas the literacy-delayed group showed significantly slower speech and language development, although they
did not differ from controls in nonverbal ability. Letter knowledge at 45 months was the
strongest predictor of literacy level at 6 years. In addition, early speech and language skills
predicted individual differences in literacy outcome and genetic risk accounted for unique
variance over and above these other factors. The results are discussed in terms of an
interactive developmental model in which semantic and phonological skills support early
reading acquisition.

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